In the early days of the telephone art, use of the telephone was often confined to communications among users within a local geographic area. As a result and over the years, the economies related to accessing a communications system have lead to telephones in a local area usually being interconnected through a central controller, often called a local central office in the art.
As digital computers came upon the scene, another local community of use was discernible. Hence, a central controller is commonly employed for interconnecting various user terminals. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 3,851,104, entitled "Digital Communications System" and issued Nov. 26, 1974, discloses a time division, multiple access communications system which, under the control of a central terminal, provides communication links among a plurality of user terminals by way of a single communications signal path.
As the digital computer art advanced, parallel advances in the semiconductor art have lead to smaller, relatively inexpensive computers. With the advent of such smaller computers, the technique of central computer control is being abandoned in favor of a distributed control technique. Also, because of the usually bursty nature of digital information, the recent trend has also been toward communications systems having a capability for handling packets of digital information. One such distributed control communications system is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,063,220, entitled "Multipoint Data Communication System with Collision Detection" and issued Dec. 13, 1977. Indeed, the '220 patent discloses a communications system in which, when a terminal is to start an intended transmission on a communications path, a phased decoder detects the presence of other transmissions on the path and, responsive thereto, delays the intended transmission until no other transmissions are sensed. Once a transmission has started, if an interference (or collision) therewith is detected, a random number generator is used to select an interval of time at the completion of which the next transmission will be attempted.
Collisions being a problem, efforts exist toward providing communication protocols for mitigating the deleterious effects of collisions. For example, a copending application by C. Flores, B. Gopinath and J. O. Limb, i.e., Ser. No. 399,428, entitled "Collision Avoiding System and Protocol for a Two Path Multiple Access Digital Communications System", and filed July 19, 1982, which application is herein incorporated by reference, discloses a communications system, station and protocol which contemplate first and second oppositely directed signal paths. At least two stations are coupled to both the first and the second signal paths. A station includes arrangements for reading one signal from the first path and for writing another signal on the first path. The one signal is read from the first path by an arrangement which electrically precedes the arrangement for writing the other signal on the first path. A similar read arrangement is electrically preceding a write arrangement on the second path. If the station has a packet to transmit, it can overwrite a busy control field of a signal packet on either path. The station can also read packets on either path. Having read a signal packet on a path, a logical interpretation may be made within the station as to whether the path is busy or is not busy. If a path is not busy, the packet may be written on the path by overwriting any signal thereon. If the path is busy, the station may defer the writing of a packet until the path is detected as not busy, i.e. through the contents of a busy control field. The packets flow down a respective path to a destination station. Eventually all packets will be transmitted and the busy control field may be detected at an end station for indicating the event that all packets have been transmitted. The end station on one path acts as the head station on the other oppositely directed path. Hence, responsive to detecting that all packets hve been transmitted, the end station on the one path, which is the head station on the other path, may transmit an end cycle packet on the other path, responsive to the detection of which event a start cycle packet is written by the head station on the one path whereby a new cycle may be started by initializing each station on the one path and by permitting each such initialized station to transmit one or more packets.
Still alternative solutions are being sought to further improve the efficiency of such systems, for example, to mitigate propagation delay time or to adapt to a situation where a signal path becomes broken or electrically open, perhaps because of a natural disaster.